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MS T R I P LEX 

iOBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



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MS TRIPLEX 



iES 
TRIPLEX 



BY 
Robert Louis Stevenson 




NEW YORK 

Charles Scribner's Sons 

1901 



I Post Office Tm j , 



NOV 6 1903 
LIBRARY 



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• 









By Transfer 

P.O. Dept. 

Mar 23 06 



D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston 



NOV 6 1903 
LIBRARY. 



MS TRIPLEX 

JL HE changes wrought by death 
are in themselves so sharp and final, 
and so terrible and melancholy in 
their consequences, that the thing 
stands alone in man's experience, and 
has no parallel upon earth. It out- 
does all other accidents because it is 
the last of them. Sometimes it leaps 
suddenly upon its victims, like a 
Thug; sometimes it lays a regular 
siege and creeps upon their citadel 
during a score of years. And when 
the business is done, there is sore 
havoc made in other people's lives, 
and a pin knocked out by which 
many subsidiary friendships hung to- 
gether. There are empty chairs, soli- 
tary walks, and single beds at night. 



JES TRIPLEX 

Again, in taking away our friends, 
death does not take them away ut- 
terly, but leaves behind a mocking, 
tragical, and soon intolerable residue, 
which must be hurriedly concealed. 
Hence a whole chapter of sights and 
customs striking to the mind, from 
the pyramids of Egypt to the gib- 
bets and dule trees of mediaeval Eu- 
rope. The poorest persons have a bit 
of pageant going towards the tomb; 
memorial stones are set up over the 
least memorable; and, in order to 
preserve some show of respect for 
what remains of our old loves and 
friendships, we must accompany it 
with much grimly ludicrous cere- 
monial, and the hired undertaker 
parades before the door. All this, and 
much more of the same sort, accom- 
panied by the eloquence of poets, has 

2 



MS TRIPLEX 

gone a great way to put humanity in 
error; nay, in many philosophies the 
error has been embodied and laid 
down with every circumstance of 
logic; although in real life the bustle 
and swiftness, in leaving people little 
time to think, have not left them 
time enough to go dangerously 
wrong in practice. 

As a matter of fact, although few 
things are spoken of with more fear- 
ful whisperings than this prospect of 
death, few have less influence on 
conduct under healthy circumstances. 
We have all heard of cities in South 
America built upon the side of fiery 
mountains, and how, even in this 
tremendous neighbourhood, the in- 
habitants are not a jot more im- 
pressed by the solemnity of mortal 
conditions than if they were delving 



JES TRIPLEX 

gardens in the greenest corner of 
England. There are serenades and 
suppers and much gallantry among 
the myrtles overhead; and mean- 
while the foundation shudders under- 
foot, the bowels of the mountain 
growl, and at any moment living 
ruin may leap sky-high into the 
moonlight, and tumble man and his 
merry-making in the dust. In the 
eyes of very young people, and very 
dull old ones, there is something in- 
describably reckless and desperate in 
such a picture. It seems not credible 
that respectable married people, with 
umbrellas, should find appetite for a 
bit of supper within quite a long dis- 
tance of a fiery mountain; ordinary 
life begins to smell of high-handed 
debauch when it is carried on so 
close to a catastrophe; and even 

4 



JES TRIPLEX 

cheese and salad, it seems, could 
hardly be relished in such circum- 
stances without something like a de- 
fiance of the Creator. It should be a 
place for nobody but hermits dwell- 
ing in prayer and maceration or mere 
born-devils drowning care in a per- 
petual carouse. 

And yet, when one comes to think 
upon it calmly, the situation of these 
South American citizens forms only 
a very pale figure for the state of 
ordinary mankind. This world itself, 
travelling blindly and swiftly in over- 
crowded space, among a million 
other worlds travelling blindly and 
swiftly in contrary directions, may 
very well come by a knock that 
would set it into explosion like a 
penny squib. And what, pathologi- 
cally looked at, is the human body 

5 



MS TRIPLEX 

with all its organs, but a mere bagful 
of petards? The least of these is as 
dangerous to the whole economy as 
the ship's powder-magazine to the 
ship; and with every breath we 
breathe, and every meal we eat, we 
are putting one or more of them in 
peril. If we clung as devotedly as 
some philosophers pretend we do to 
the abstract idea of life, or were half 
as frightened as they make out we 
are, for the subversive accident that 
ends it all, the trumpets might sound 
by the hour and no one would follow 
them into battle — the blue-peter 
might fly at the truck, but who 
would climb into a sea-going ship? 
Think (if these philosophers were 
right) with what a preparation of 
spirit we should affront the daily 
peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier 
6 



MS TRIPLEX 

spot than any battle-field in history, 
where the far greater proportion of 
our ancestors have miserably left 
their bones! What woman would 
ever be lured into marriage, so much 
more dangerous than the wildest sea? 
And what would it be to grow old? 
For, after a certain distance, every 
step we take in life we find the ice 
growing thinner below our feet, and 
all around us and behind us we see 
our contemporaries going through. 
By the time a man gets well into the 
seventies, his continued existence is a 
mere miracle; and when he lays his 
old bones in bed for the night, there 
is an overwhelming probability that 
he will never see the day. Do the old 
men mind it, as a matter of fact? 
Why, no. They were never merrier; 
they have their grog at night, and 
7 



JES TRIPLEX 

tell the raciest stories; they hear of 
the death of people about their own 
age, or even younger, not as if it was 
a grisly warning, but with a simple 
childlike pleasure at having outlived 
some one else; and when a draught 
might puff them out like a guttering 
candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter 
them like so much glass, their old 
hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, 
and they go on, bubbling with laugh- 
ter, through years of man's age com- 
pared to which the valley at Bala- 
clava was as safe and peaceful as a 
village cricket-green on Sunday. It 
may fairly be questioned (if we look 
to the peril only) whether it was a 
much more daring feat for Curtius to 
plunge into the gulf, than for any 
old gentleman of ninety to doff his 
clothes and clamber into bed. 

8 



MS TRIPLEX 

Indeed, it is a memorable subject 
for consideration, with what uncon- 
cern and gaiety mankind pricks on 
along the Valley of the Shadow of 
Death. The whole way is one wil- 
derness of snares, and the end of it, 
for those who fear the last pinch, is 
irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spin- 
ning through it all, like a party for 
the Derby. Perhaps the reader re- 
members one of the humorous de- 
vices of the deified Caligula : how he 
encouraged a vast concourse of holi- 
day-makers on to his bridge over 
Baiae bay; and when they were in 
the height of their enjoyment, turned 
loose the Praetorian guards among 
the company, and had them tossed 
into the sea. This is no bad minia- 
ture of the dealings of nature with 
the transitory race of man. Only, 
9 



.ES TRIPLEX 

what a chequered picnic we have 
of it, even while it lasts! and into 
what great waters, not to be crossed 
by any swimmer, God's pale Praeto- 
rian throws us over in the end! 

We live the time that a match 
flickers; we pop the cork of a gin- 
ger-beer bottle, and the earthquake 
swallows us on the instant. Is it 
not odd, is it not incongruous, is it 
not, in the highest sense of human 
speech, incredible, that we should 
think so highly of the ginger-beer, 
and regard so little the devouring 
earthquake? The love of Life and 
the fear of Death are two famous 
phrases that grow harder to under- 
stand the more we think about 
them. It is a well-known fact that 
an immense proportion of boat acci- 
dents would never happen if people 
10 



MS TRIPLEX 

held the sheet in their hands instead 
of making it fast; and yet, unless it 
be some martinet of a professional 
mariner or some landsman with shat- 
tered nerves, every one of God's 
creatures makes it fast. A strange 
instance of man's unconcern and 
brazen boldness in the face of death ! 
We confound ourselves with meta- 
physical phrases, which we import 
into daily talk with noble inappro- 
priateness. We have no idea of what 
death is, apart from its circumstances 
and some of its consequences to 
others; and although we have some 
experience of living, there is not a 
man on earth who has flown so high 
into abstraction as to have any prac- 
tical guess at the meaning of the 
word life. All literature, from Job 
and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Car- 
11 



MS TRIPLEX 

lyle or Walt Whitman, is but an 
attempt to look upon the human 
state with such largeness of view as 
shall enable us to rise from the con- 
sideration of living to the Definition 
of Life. And our sages give us about 
the best satisfaction in their power 
when they say that it is a vapour, 
or a show, or made out of the same 
stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its 
more rigid sense, has been at the 
same work for ages; and after a 
myriad bald heads have wagged 
over the problem, and piles of words 
have been heaped one upon another 
into dry and cloudy volumes without 
end, philosophy has the honour of 
laying before us, with modest pride, 
her contribution towards the subject: 
that life is a Permanent Possibility 
of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A 
12 



JES TRIPLEX 

man may very well love beef, or 
hunting, or a woman; but surely, 
surely, not a Permanent Possibility 
of Sensation! He may be afraid of 
a precipice, or a dentist, or a large 
enemy with a club, or even an un- 
dertaker's man; but not certainly of 
abstract death. We may trick with 
the word life in its dozen senses until 
we are weary of tricking ; we may 
argue in terms of all the philosophies 
on earth, but one fact remains true 
throughout — that we do not love 
life, in the sense that we are greatly 
preoccupied about its conservation; 
that we do not, properly speaking, 
love life at all, but living. Into the 
views of the least careful there will 
enter some degree of providence ; no 
man's eyes are fixed entirely on the 
passing hour; but although we have 

13 



JES TRIPLEX 

some anticipation of good health, 
good weather, wine, active employ- 
ment, love, and self-approval, the 
sum of these anticipations does not 
amount to anything like a general 
view of life's possibilities and issues; 
nor are those who cherish them most 
vividly, at all the most scrupulous of 
their personal safety. To be deeply 
interested in the accidents of our 
existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed 
texture of human experience, rather 
leads a man to disregard precautions, 
and risk his neck against a straw. For 
surely the love of living is stronger 
in an Alpine climber roping over a 
peril, or a hunter riding merrily at 
a stiff fence, than in a creature who 
lives upon a diet and walks a meas- 
ured distance in the interest of his 
constitution. 

14 



JES TRIPLEX 

There is a great deal of very vile 
nonsense talked upon both sides of 
the matter: tearing divines reducing 
life to the dimensions of a mere 
funeral procession, so short as to be 
hardly decent; and melancholy unbe- 
lievers yearning for the tomb as if 
it were a world too far away. Both 
sides must feel a little ashamed of 
their performances now and again 
when they draw in their chairs to 
dinner. Indeed, a good meal and 
a bottle of wine is an answer to 
most standard works upon the ques- 
tion. When a man's heart warms 
to his viands, he forgets a great deal 
of sophistry, and soars into a rosy 
zone of contemplation. Death may 
be knocking at the door, like the 
Commander's statue; we have some- 
thing else in hand, thank God, and 

15 



JES TRIPLEX 

let him knock. Passing bells are 
ringing all the world over. All the 
world over, and every hour, some 
one is parting company with all his 
aches and ecstasies. For us also 
the trap is laid. But we are so fond 
of life that we have no leisure to 
entertain the terror of death. It is 
a honeymoon with us all through, 
and none of the longest. Small 
blame to us if we give our whole 
hearts to this glowing bride of ours, 
to the appetites, to honour, to the 
hungry curiosity of the mind, to the 
pleasure of the eyes in nature, and 
the pride of our own nimble bodies. 
We all of us appreciate the sen- 
sations; but as for caring about the 
Permanence of the Possibility, a 
man's head is generally very bald, 
and his senses very dull, before he 
16 



MS TRIPLEX 

comes to that. Whether we regard 
life as a lane leading to a dead wall 
— a mere bag's end, as the French 
say — or whether we think of it as 
a vestibule or gymnasium, where 
we wait our turn and prepare our 
faculties for some more noble des- 
tiny ; whether we thunder in a pulpit, 
or pule in little atheistic poetry- 
books, about its vanity and brevity; 
whether we look justly for years of 
health and vigour, or are about to 
mount into a bath-chair, as a step 
towards the hearse; in each and all 
of these views and situations there 
is but one conclusion possible: that 
a man should stop his ears against 
paralysing terror, and run the race 
that is set before him with a single 
mind. No one surely could have 
recoiled with more heartache and 
17 



jES triplex 

terror from the thought of death 
than our respected lexicographer; 
and yet we know how little it af- 
fected his conduct, how wisely and 
boldly he walked, and in what a 
fresh and lively vein he spoke of 
life. Already an old man, he ven- 
tured on his Highland tour; and his 
heart, bound with triple brass, did 
not recoil before twenty-seven indi- 
vidual cups of tea. As courage and 
intelligence are the two qualities 
best worth a good man's cultivation, 
so it is the first part of intelligence 
to recognize our precarious estate in 
life, and the first part of courage to 
be not at all abashed before the fact. 
A frank and somewhat headlong 
carriage, not looking too anxiously 
before, not dallying in maudlin re- 
gret over the past, stamps the man 

18 



MS triplex 

who is well armoured for this world. 
And not only well armoured for 
himself, but a good friend and a 
good citizen to boot. We do not 
go to cowards for tender dealing; 
there is nothing so cruel as panic; 
the man who has least fear for his 
own carcass has most time to con- 
sider others. That eminent chemist 
who took his walks abroad in tin 
shoes, and subsisted wholly upon 
tepid milk, had all his work cut out 
for him in considerate dealings with 
his own digestion. So soon as pru- 
dence has begun to grow up in the 
brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds 
its first expression in a paralysis of 
generous acts. The victim begins 
to shrink spiritually; he develops a 
fancy for parlours with a regulated 
temperature, and takes his morality 
19 



JES TRIPLEX 

on the principle of tin shoes and 
tepid milk. The care of one impor- 
tant body or soul becomes so en- 
grossing, that all the noises of the 
outer world begin to come thin and 
faint into the parlour with the regu- 
lated temperature; and the tin shoes 
go equably forward over blood and 
rain. To be overwise is to ossify; 
and the scruple-monger ends by 
standing stockstill. Now the man 
who has his heart on his sleeve, and 
a good whirling weathercock of a 
brain, who reckons his life as a 
thing to be dashingly used and 
cheerfully hazarded, makes a very 
different acquaintance of the world, 
keeps all his pulses going true and 
fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, 
until, if he be running towards any- 
thing better than wildfire, he may 

20 



JES TRIPLEX 

shoot up and become a constellation 
in the end. Lord look after his 
health, Lord have a care of his soul, 
says he; and he has at the key of 
the position, and swashes through 
incongruity and peril towards his 
aim. Death is on all sides of him 
with pointed batteries, as he is on 
all sides of all of us; unfortunate 
surprises gird him round; mim- 
mouthed friends and relations hold 
up their hands in quite a little ele- 
giacal synod about his path: and 
what cares he for all this? Being a 
true lover of living, a fellow with 
something pushing and spontaneous 
in his inside, he must, like any other 
soldier, in any other stirring, deadly 
warfare, push on at his best pace 
until he touch the goal. "A peerage 
or Westminster Abbey!" cried Nel- 

21 



JES TRIPLEX 

son in his bright, boyish, heroic man- 
ner. These are great incentives; not 
for any of these, but for the plain 
satisfaction of living, of being about 
their business in some sort or other, 
do the brave, serviceable men of 
every nation tread down the nettle 
danger, and pass flyingly over all 
the stumbling-blocks of prudence. 
Think of the heroism of Johnson, 
think of that superb indifference 
to mortal limitation that set him 
upon his dictionary, and carried him 
through triumphantly until the end! 
Who, if he were wisely considerate 
of things at large, would ever em- 
bark upon any work much more 
considerable than a halfpenny post 
card? Who would project a serial 
novel, after Thackeray and Dickens 
had each fallen in mid-course? Who 
22 



MS TRIPLEX 

would find heart enough to begin 
to live, if he dallied with the con- 
sideration of death ? 

And, after all, what sorry and piti- 
ful quibbling all this is ! To forego all 
the issues of living in a parlour with 
a regulated temperature — as if that 
were not to die a hundred times 
over, and for ten years at a stretch! 
As if it were not to die in one's 
own lifetime, and without even the 
sad immunities of death! As if it 
were not to die, and yet be the pa- 
tient spectators of our own pitiable 
change! The Permanent Possibility 
is preserved, but the sensations care- 
fully held at arm's length, as if one 
kept a photographic plate in a dark 
chamber. It is better to lose health 
like a spendthrift than to waste it 
like a miser. It is better to live and 

23 



MS TRIPLEX 

be done with it, than to die daily in 
the sickroom. By all means begin 
your folio; even if the doctor does 
not give you a year, even if he hesi- 
tates about a month, make one brave 
push and see what can be accom- 
plished in a week. It is not only in 
finished undertakings that we ought 
to honour useful labour. A spirit 
goes out of the man who means 
execution, which outlives the most 
untimely ending. All who have 
meant good work with their whole 
hearts, have done good work, al- 
though they may die before they 
have the time to sign it. Every heart 
that has beat strong and cheerfully 
has left a hopeful impulse behind it 
in the world, and bettered the tradi- 
tion of mankind. And even if death 
catch people, like an open pitfall, 

24 



MS TRIPLEX 

and in mid-career, laying out vast 
projects, and planning monstrous 
foundations, flushed with hope, and 
their mouths full of boastful lan- 
guage, they should be at once 
tripped up and silenced: is there 
not something brave and spirited in 
such a termination? and does not 
life go down with a better grace, 
foaming in full body over a preci- 
pice, than miserably straggling to 
an end in sandy deltas? When the 
Greeks made their fine saying that 
those whom the gods love die young, 
I cannot help believing they had 
this sort of death also in their eye. 
For surely, at whatever age it over- 
take the man, this is to die young. 
Death has not been suffered to take 
so much as an illusion from his 
heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe 

25 



MS TRIPLEX 

on the highest point of being, he 
passes at a bound on to the other 
side. The noise of the mallet and 
chisel is scarcely quenched, the 
trumpets are hardly done blowing, 
when, trailing with him clouds 
of glory, this happy- starred, full- 
blooded spirit shoots into the spir- 
itual land. 



THE END 



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